There was a photo album published a few years back titled
"The Commissar Vanishes". In showed pairs of photographs from the Soviet Union during the Stalin era, the originals and the retouched versions where the party hacks and revolutionary heroes out of favor or out in Siberia, or out shot dead, were "disappeared" using whatever retouching technique was available then (it wasn't airbrushing, was it?) It was quite fascinating and funny too. Interestingly enough, many of these photographs had had two lives, that is too say the originals had been published and sometimes displayed in government offices just a few years before the new, improved versions replaced them.
I see now that there is a web site devoted to this very topic, somewhere here.
Can somebody explain the difference between the Commissar Vanishes and the topic we are discussing here today? Oh, I see, the liberals would explain to us that they are well intentioned in such "improvements".
I've thumbed through The Comissar Vanishes. It looks to be identical to Making People Disappear except that it does not have the communist Vietnam photos.
MPD also covers Mao's China, Nazi Germany, Russia, and Cuba.